Vanishing Point

As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.

Mark Sanford, a Republican congressman from South Carolina who lost his seat in June after sparring with the president on several issues, has been thinking a lot about Hitler. He is quick to point out that he is not comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. “Let me be clear about that, okay?” he told me days after he was defeated in a GOP primary that was defined by one overriding question: Which candidate was more slavishly devoted to the president? It wasn’t really a contest.

Donald Trump arrives in Essex, England on July 12, 2018.

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Sanford, a brooding lone wolf among House Republicans, has survived a lot in his political career. He was a member of the House in the nineties and then a popular two-term governor, though his last two years in office were marred by his notorious “hiking the Appalachian trail” adultery scandal. He divorced his wife and narrowly averted impeachment by the South Carolina legislature. After it was all behind him, he ran for Congress again in a 2013 special election and found that voters in the overwhelmingly Republican district had forgiven him. But that was five long years ago. In the Trump era, most Republicans, when approached by reporters on Capitol Hill, have learned to scurry away or feign an important call on their cell phones to avoid the inevitable questions about the most recent lunatic comment from the president.

“If we tried to respond to everything the president said, we’d never get anything done,” said Lynn Jenkins, a House Republican from Kansas who told me she saves her public condemnations of Trump for only his most egregious statements, like the time he made up a story about a female TV anchor “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” But Sanford, while still voting about 70 percent of the time with Trump on legislation, hasn’t been shy about criticizing the president, taking him to task for everything from his budget (“a lie”) to the Stormy Daniels scandal (“deeply troubling”).

As he told me, “You’re on whatever show and they ask you about the latest crazy tweet and you answer honestly: ‘That’s crazy!’ ” His frankness, he said, “became definitional in this race.” Indeed, his opponent’s most devastating TV ad simply strung together short, contextless clips of Sanford’s Trump criticisms: “I have to disagree with the president on this. . . . If he would just shut up. . . . The guy said something stupid.” The president finished Sanford off with an election-day tweet calling him “nothing but trouble” and making snide reference to his affair.

In her victory speech, Katie Arrington, his opponent, made the lesson of the race clear. “We are the party of President Donald J. Trump,” she declared. Sanford told me that when he saw her comment, he thought, “What kind of parallel universe do I live in?”

Mark Sanford appears on ’Meet the Press,’ June 15, 2018.

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Which brings us back to Hitler. Like any good conservative, Sanford has studied and reveres Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the philosopher-economist’s 1944 account of how dictators take over democracies. Again, he’s not comparing Trump to Hitler.

But still, he’s worried about America’s political dysfunction, Trump’s “strongman” affinities, and where that combination could lead. He also brings up the fall of Athenian democracy. “In part this is not a new movie,” he concluded. “This is a replaying of a script that’s played throughout the ages, but with incredibly ominous possibilities if we don’t recognize the dangers of the themes that are now at play within American society.”

Arrington was right. The GOP is the party of Trump. Over the summer, as he hit the five-hundred-day mark of his presidency, his Gallup approval rating among his own party’s members—87 percent—was higher than that of any postwar president except George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Trump famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose supporters. A year and a half into his term, that statement has become more plausible than ever.

As the country awaits whatever conclusions Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation brings, the most important question in politics may be whether there is any red line Trump could cross and lose significant party support. Four and a half decades ago, Republicans stuck with Richard Nixon until incontrovertible evidence of his crimes emerged. Democrats never abandoned Bill Clinton because they believed his misdeeds weren’t impeachable. What is the red line for a contemporary GOP increasingly built around a personality cult? I put that question to a dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, a mix from across the ideological spectrum and from every region of the country. The conversations revealed a lot about the Trump GOP, but the red line, with respect to Trump’s behavior generally, or his conduct specific to the Mueller probe, was vanishingly thin and difficult to detect. And every time you think you see it—pee tape, porn-star liaison, erratic diplomacy, threats to fire Mueller—it keeps moving. As Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, “I don’t know that there is one.”

“That player is the worst human being on the face of the earth, but if that same talented player is on our team, well, you know, they’re our team, so we give him a pass.”

Flake never supported Trump and has been the president’s most consistent critic in Congress, though one who still votes for much of his agenda. When Flake was deciding whether to run for reelection this year, one of his political consultants told him there was only one path: “You’ve got to be okay with Trump’s policies or be quiet about them and be okay with his behavior or be quiet about it.” Flake decided to retire instead.

Jenkins, the congresswoman from Kansas, relayed a conversation she recently had with a factory owner back home, who told her that while the guys on his shop floor “hate” Trump—they are from the Bible Belt, after all, she noted—“they love what he’s doing.” She then offered the most honest explanation I’ve heard for this phenomenon. “It’s kind of like supporting your favorite team and there’s a talented trash-talking personality on the other team,” she said. “That player is the worst human being on the face of the earth, but if that same talented player is on our team, well, you know, they’re our team, so we give him a pass.”

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was known as one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. I caught Graham on his cell phone while he was visiting Iraq in July. During the 2016 campaign, he called Trump “a kook,” adding, “I think he is unfit for office.” Graham is now much more diplomatic, offering himself up as a kind of translator between the #NeverTrump movement and the party’s base. On the plus side for him were the judges, the tax cuts, the fight against ISIS, and the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. On the other side were Trump’s “uncertainty about our commitment” to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; his trade policy; and his lack of seriousness about Russian meddling in American elections. “This constant minimizing of Putin and his agenda—very problematic.”

Those were his toughest words for Trump. I was surprised how much he was soft-selling his well-known disagreements with the man on foreign policy, especially Trump’s retreat from defending our democratic allies. I asked him if the American president was still the leader of the free world. He paused for five seconds before telling me, “America First is one or two things. It’s an understanding that we’re a unique country and it’s about burden sharing,” he said. “You gotta remember, he won. I think when the president talks of how other countries are taking advantage of us, we’re fighting their wars, we’re spending too much for their defense, that resonates with people.” He never did answer the question.

Earlier this year, Graham made the case that if Trump fired Mueller, “it would be the end of President Trump’s presidency.” I asked if he still believed that about Mueller. He let out a deep sigh. “He’s done such a number on this guy, I don’t know,” he said, referring to Trump’s attacks on Mueller’s credibility.

Leonard Lance, a congressman from New Jersey, was one Republican, albeit a moderate, who volunteered a red line: “Personal collusion by Trump with the Russians during the campaign.” But if Republicans keep the House and the Senate this fall, Trump will have a political fortress protecting him in Washington. That prospect has led a few anti-Trump Republicans, like Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to openly support a Democratic takeover of Congress. In their minds, there is no red line for the GOP. I came to the same conclusion after my hours of interviews.

Conservative Trump critics fear becoming the next Sanford and stay quiet—what Flake and others call the “don’t poke the bear” mind-set. Meanwhile, many of the moderate anti-Trump Republicans are leaving office. Congressman Ryan Costello, a Republican from Pennsylvania who decided to quit (redistricting gave him a bluer constituency), said, “If I were running for reelection, every single time that I saw on the TV screen that the president was going to hold another rally, I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ Because he’s going to say fifty things that aren’t accurate.”

Sanford has started to think seriously about what he should do now to contain the forces he says Trump has unleashed. “I came back to Congress worried primarily about debt, deficit, and government spending,” he told me. “This thing, though, given my own personal experiences, has begun to crowd into that space, to say this is a bigger and more clear and present danger to the republic than even the debt and the deficit that I thought was the end of the world.”

I asked Sanford: If he really believed what he said about Trump, shouldn’t he too support a Democratic takeover of the House or Senate? He paused for a long time, perhaps wondering how Friedrich Hayek might answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I mean, everybody’s going to come up with their own remedy as to what you do next. I wouldn’t say that’s mine.”

But he wouldn’t rule it out.

“I’m not there at this point,” he said. “Let me just take one day at a time.”

This article appears in the September '18 issue of Esquire. Subscribe Today

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